Philadelphia, Allegheny, Great Smoky, Lincoln, High Plains, Great Basin, Los Angeles…

Click to enlarge. Credit: Neil Freeman

Freeman, an artist and urban planner, reorganized the states into 50 bodies of equal population and presented this new political landscape on his website, FakeIsTheNewReal.org. He preserved major metropolitan areas and used dominant physical features — rivers, mostly — to name the new geographic units.

The resulting map is logical, thoughtful, and pretty damned faithful to the physical and cultural geography of our nation.

“It’s not serious,” says Freeman, “but people took it seriously.” (As in, you’ll split up Texas over my dead body.) Geographer Stentor Danielson, who blogs about environmental and social issues (with a spatial bent) at Debitage.net, suggests that the lumping together of South Jersey and Philadelphia rings true culturally but would be an environmental disaster. If it weren’t for the state border along the Delaware River, Philadelphia might have sucked the Pine Barrens dry.

“Really, this map is meant to be an ironic look at Electoral College reform,” says Freeman.

Freeman’s map caught a wave of attention when he first posted it to his website after the 2004 presidential election. Earlier this year it was picked up again by several political bloggers, including James Fallows and Matthew Yglesias. (Fallows invites his readers to imagine a decennial redistricting of the states to reflect changes in population: “In a reapportioned Senate each of of these units would have two votes.”)

Freeman followed a few simple rules:
1. Keep populations equal (Freeman’s states range from 5.4 to 5.6 million people, according to 2000 U.S. Census data. Actual state populations range from ~500 thousand to ~33 million)
2. Place major cities and close-in suburbs in a single state
3. When possible, follow existing state and county boundaries
4. Keep river valleys intact

“I used rivers as a guide for picking names,” he says. Turns out, this strategy makes a lot of sense. Freeman recently read ‘Names on the Land,’ an historical account of place-naming by George Stewart. “I think I was unconsciously following the names he gives in the book.”

Check out some of the Freeman’s other projects over at FakeIsTheNewReal, including my favorites:
Brooklyn Typology — linking photographs and data “to form a portrait of the urban fabric of Brooklyn”
Subways at Scale — aspatial maps of urban subways
Chicago Mile by Mile — photographing Chicago’s street grid

Redistricting the Nation allows the public to:

• Enter their address (nation-wide) and view the “shape” of their federal, state, and local election districts.
• Learn who is in charge of drawing the boundaries of their election districts (e.g., independent commissions or elected representatives).
• Compare the “compactness” scores of their election district to other, similar districts (less compact and unusually shaped districts are more likely to be gerrymandered).
• Draw new district boundaries on a map and generate compactness scores for the new district.

RedistrictingTheNation.com Screenshot

California’s 23rd Congressional District is at the very top of our Top Ten list!

CA-23—a long, skinny strip of land along California’s central coast—is a product of the state legislature’s latest bi-partisan gerrymander. Several California representatives have admitted that the post-2000 Census redistricting effort was an “incumbent retention plan” for both political parties. CA-23 is in good company; the district joins CA-15(#12), CA-53 (#13), CA-38 (#15), and CA-7 (#18) at the top of our least compact Congressional District list, making California a true “wonder” when it comes to gerrymandering.

California's 23rd congressional district: The least compact U.S. House District

Hope (and a reason to get out of bed) is in sight. In November 2008, Californians narrowly passed Proposition 11—an amendment to the state constitution that places the authority to draw state-level district boundaries in the hands of an independent, 14-member commission.  The task of redrawing Congressional districts was not part of Proposition 11, though a Congressional Redistricting Initiative may be added to the November 2010 ballot, just in time for the post-2010 Census redistricting process.

And with that we officially launch Redistricting the Nation!

Florida's 22nd Congressional District: The 2nd least compact U.S. House District

Tomorrow morning we’ll unveil the #1 least compact congressional district before launching our hotly-anticipated Redistricting the Nation site. Stay tuned!

North Carolina's 12th Congressional District: The 3rd least compact U.S. House District

In 1996 the Supreme Court ruled that the boundaries of the district (different than those shown here) were unconstitutional because race had been a predominant factor in their formation, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Over the next 5 years the proposed district boundaries underwent a series of changes and court challenges, and in 2001 the Supreme Court upheld the district boundaries as constitutional, finding that political party affiliation, rather than race, had been the predominant factor in the district drawing process. By that time, of course, the 2000 Census had already been completed and the cycle would begin again.

Similar to IL-04, the case of NC-12 exemplifies that tangled considerations that are at stake when devising a districting plan. States that are subject to the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act have often walked a fine line with respect to ensuring that racial minorities are furnished with an opportunity for elected representation without verging into race-based gerrymandering. From the perspective of political parties, Republicans and largely Democratic African-American voters often find their interests to be strangely aligned through the packing of  minority voters into a single district. White Democratic candidates, meanwhile, can benefit from the breakup of such districts, which can boost their chances of election through the dispersion of African-American Democrats into neighboring districts.

New York's 28th Congressional District: the 4th least compact U.S. House District

Although NY-28 has been represented by a Democrat for more than 20 years, it is in fact a product of a gerrymander by the once-majority Republicans of New York’s state legislature, who have long maintained a hold on state legislative districts in the northern part of the state through prison-based gerrymandering (more here and here). NY-28, however, represents a classic case of gerrymandering through “packing”: concentrating members of a voting bloc in a single district, thereby allowing the other party to win the remainder of the districts. The 28th District skirts the shores of Lake Ontario to connect Democratic enclaves in the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls in the west to those in Rochester, to the east. This gerrymander seemed to serve the Republicans well until NY-27 switched to Democratic in the 2004 elections and NY-25 and NY-29 flipped in 2008. Republicans still hold NY-26, directly to the south of NY-28.

It’s hard to predict what the future will hold for the shape of New York’s Congressional districts. Democrats currently control both houses of the state legislature, but the defection of two members of the Democrats’ slim 32-30 Senate majority prompted a leadership crisis earlier this year. Moreover, all of the seats in both the Assembly and the Senate are up for grabs in the November 2010 elections, leaving responsibility for the subsequent 2011 redistricting an open question.

Illinois's 4th Congressional District: The 5th least compact U.S. House District

Unlike some of the entries in our Top Ten list, IL-04 is an inland district whose shape has no apparent relationship to physical geography. The two major portions of the district are connected by a thin, C-shaped thread that is just one block wide in many places, running along railroad tracks and tracing Interstate 294 to the west. The district’s boundaries were drawn in relation to human geography, capturing two majority Hispanic communities—a largely Puerto Rican one to the north and a largely Mexican one to the south—and almost surrounding the majority African-American IL-07, which extends to the east.

The post-2000 Illinois Congressional redistricting plan was the subject of multiple lawsuits, some of which charged that it failed to meet the compactness requirements of the state constitution. The district is yet another illustration of the tensions inherent in the redistricting process, between the value of compact districts and the Voting Rights Act requirement that ethnic minorities have sufficient opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

The case of IL-04 also represents the challenge (likely to grow as the country’s Latino population increases) of drawing districts that afford both African-American and Latino communities the chance at elected representation, particularly in urban areas where these populations often live side by side but may be geographically dispersed due to historical patterns of urban development.

We suspect that 2011 will bring many more lawsuits challenging the spatial interpretation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act—not to mention political self-interest—that legislative district boundaries represent.

]]> http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2009/10/redistricting-top-10-il-04-5-2/feed/ 1 http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2009/10/redistricting-top-10-nj-06-6/ http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2009/10/redistricting-top-10-nj-06-6/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:34:31 +0000 Dana Bauer http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/?p=516 NJ-6 is #6! This is the second district from New Jersey to make our Top Ten list of least compact congressional districts. What’s up with the Garden State?

Check out this 2006 article in Slate, which tells the story of New Jersey’s Great Bipartisan Gerrymander. Key concept: “…the problem in Congress isn’t just the politicians, but also the process that put them in office.”

New Jersey's 6th Congressional District: The 6th least compact U.S. House District

For more juicy stories and powerful stats about redistricting in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (with a focus on our home city of Philadelphia), check out Redistricting the Philadelphia Region. It’s a taste of what you’ll find in our broader Redistricting the Nation site, launching on October 21.

New York's 8th Congressional District: The 7th least compact U.S. House district

NY-8 is an urban gem. While the district appears contiguous in the image above, it’s really divided across two separate land masses — the northern part of the district stretches from the Upper West Side to the tip of Manhattan; the southern part skips along the edge of Brooklyn to pick up parts of the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island.  Physical geography played a role in the creation of this two-part district, but a bigger driving force was the desire of legislators to consolidate the Hispanic vote in neighboring NY-12.

We plan to pick up the pace of our Top Ten countdown over the next several days. The October 21 launch of Redistricting the Nation is fast approaching. Like the crew of the Gerrymandering movie, we’re working down to the wire. Good luck to all of us!

Florida's Third Congressional District: The 8th least compact U.S. House district

FL-3 — created by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats after the 1990 census — starts in Jacksonville and pulls in African-American communities from Gainesville, Palatka, and Sanford as it moves south to the Orlando suburbs. It’s difficult to say what this district looks like because it’s so oddly shaped. But “flying squirrel, plunging downward head first” comes to mind, as does “mangled alien.” One colleague says that FL-3 reminds her of her toddler’s Ugly Doll, right down to the missing antenna, torn off during a rough-and-tumble play date.

Stay tuned for more countdown highlights later this week. Redistricting the Nation will launch on October 21.